It's to be hoped that Francis Maude and a Whitehall team can salvage a
promising welfare scheme. The dependency culture costs this country billions
every year

The introduction ofUniversal Creditwould appear, from the outside, to be following a depressingly familiar script. A government department embarks on a bold attempt to overhaul a particular aspect of the public services, centred on a highly ambitious and largely uncosted IT programme. Before long, cracks start to appear: it turns out that Whitehall has neither the manpower nor the expertise needed, resulting in numerous false starts and delays. A series of leaks, off-the-record briefings and finally official inquiries tell a depressing story of bungling and mismanagement; after years of wasted effort, and billions of pounds in wasted spending, the whole project is eventually consigned to the scrapheap.

There are, however, good reasons to hope that this particular story will have a rather happier ending. The first is that Universal Credit remains, fundamentally, a very good idea. The confusing mishmash of benefits and bribes that grew up under Labour helped create a world of perverse incentives, where people could be worse off – or, more usually, only very slightly better off – if they moved from welfare into work. Simplifying the payment of six benefits into one, and bringing in tapers that reward the low-paid, rather than punishing them with a sudden withdrawal of support, should improve matters substantially (although the marginal tax rate on the poor will still be higher than it ought to be).

The problem is not the idea but the implementation. Introducing seamless connectivity between the nation’s tax and benefits databases was always going to be challenging – and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) badly underestimated its own abilities and the scale of the challenge. What should have been a bureaucratic Manhattan Project, drawing on the talents of the best and brightest in Whitehall, ended up in the hands of civil servants apparently more suited to running a borough council. The result, as documented in scathing reports from the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee of MPs, was a shambles. Management was “alarmingly weak”; a “fortress” mentality developed, alongside a “good news” culture in which ministers were kept in the dark about mistakes. Things became so chaotic that secretaries were signing off million-pound contracts.

Matters were not helped by squabbling within Whitehall, which should have been collectively focused on ensuring that the project was a success. The Treasury always took a dim view of the plan – fuelled by George Osborne’s apparent intellectual disdain forIain Duncan Smith, the minister responsible, who intended Universal Credit to be the centrepiece of his moral mission to eradicate the dependency culture. Even within the DWP, problems remain: Mr Duncan Smith has palpably lost trust in his permanent secretary, Robert Devereux, whose departure he clearly desires but is unable to enforce.

So why the grounds for optimism? Largely because the programme appears to be in much better hands, and in a much better state. With the assistance of Francis Maude, the minister for the Cabinet Office, a squad of Whitehall heavy-hitters has been brought in to overhaul the project. Those involved are reportedly deciding whether to move to a cheaper, innovative but untested web-based system, or to salvage more of the existing work – but they are doing so from a position of bitterly earned experience.

While there has been waste, the amounts involved are trifling compared with the size of the prize on offer (and, indeed, with the white elephants of the Labour years, most notoriously the NHS IT programme). The dependency culture costs this country uncounted billions every year – on top of the basic moral failure, so powerfully outlined by Mr Duncan Smith, of a society that consigns so many of its citizens to the scrap heap. Universal Credit remains the only realistic plan on the table to address this problem. Perhaps that is why, despite its teething troubles, it remains popular with the voters – to the extent that even the Liberal Democrats, usually so eager to dissociate themselves from Tory projects, have remained on board. Abandoning the project would be a betrayal not just of manifesto promises, but of the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. Ministers owe it to themselves, and to the country, to get it right.